Banned Books Week is
basically an annual celebration of our society’s failures to uphold free
speech. By looking back at what was once deemed too hot, heavy, or
dangerous for public consumption, we see how much work there is to do in the
present to preserve that freedom: every year more and more authors are stepping
forward with challenging ideas that someone else wants to
keep you from hearing about.

Censorship isn’t a
one-sided affair, people all over the political spectrum can find
themselves in a panic over what information is disseminated, and how.
Wikipedia’s current list of the most commonly challenged library books serves as a veritable Who’s Who of
literary heroes, anti-heroes, and outright villains (and where else are you
going to see Mein Kampf, Fifty Shades of Grey,
and Captain Underpants all on a list together?).

Below you’ll
find some of the naughty bits that have kept books
like these in the line of fire, in some cases for almost a century.
An author wrote them, an editor edited them, a publisher published them — and
then for whatever reason, all hell broke loose.

Extracted lines in red

Abbie
Hoffman, Steal This Book, 1971
“If shoplifting food seems easy, it’s nothing compared to the snatching of clothing. Shop only the better stores. Try things on in those neat little secluded stalls. The less bulky items, such
as shirts, vests, belts and socks can be tied around your waist or leg with
large rubber bands if needed.”

E.L.
James, Fifty Shades of Grey, 2011
“Christian squirts baby oil into his hand and then rubs my behind with careful
tenderness — from makeup remover to soothing balm for a spanked ass, who would have thought it was such a versatile liquid.”

Julius Lester, Look Out, Whitey! Back Power’s Gon’ Get
Your Mama!, 1968
“The old order passes away. Like the black riderless horse, boots turned wrong
way in the stirrups, following the coffin down the boulevard, it passes away.
But there are no crowds to watch
as it passes. There are no crowds,
to mourn, to weep. No eulogies to read and no eternal flame is
lit over the grave. There is no time, for there are streets to be cleaned, houses painted, and clothes washed. Everything must be scoured
clean. Trash has to be thrown out. Garbage dumped and everything unfit,
burned.”

The new order is coming,
child.
The old is passing away.”

Tom
Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 1968
“But in July of 1964, not even the hip world of New York was quite ready for
the phenomenon of a bunch of people roaring across the continental USA in a bus
covered with swirling Day-Glo mandalas aiming movie cameras and microphones at
every freaking thing in this whole freaking country, while Neal
Cassady wheeled the bus around the high curves like Super Hud and the US nation
streamed across the windshield like one of those goddamned Cinemascope
landscape cameras that winds up your optic nerves like the rubber band in a toy
airplane and let us now be popping more speed and smoking grass as if it were all just coming out of Cosmo the Prankster god’s own local-option
gumball machines…”

William
Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook, 1971
“You must always have a secret plan. Everything depends on this: it is the only
question. So as not to be conquered by the conquered territory in which you lead your life, so as not to feel the horrible weight of inertia wrecking your will and bending you to the ground, so as not to spend a single
night more wondering what there is to do or how to connect with your neighbors
and countrymen, you must
make secret plans without respite.”

Joseph
Heller, Catch-22, 1961“The enemy is anybody
who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”

Adolf
Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925
“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the
people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will
happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”

Grace
Metalious, Peyton Place, 1956
“Give me a child until he is seven, thought Tom, and he is forever after mine. When the Fascists say it, they’re bums and kidnappers, but when the Church says it, it is known as putting a kid on the right
track.”

Maya
Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1969
“The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose.”

David
Levithan, Two Boys Kissing, 2013
“We gather the things we
learned, and they don’t nearly
add up to fill the space of a life.
You will miss the taste of Froot Loops.
You will miss the sound of traffic.
You will miss your back against his.
You will miss him stealing the sheets.Do not ignore these
things.”

Emma
Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, 1910
“No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be
within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of
conditions or place or time.”

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Virtual Inspiration

Quotes that got my attention

Albert Einstein said "“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Response: Finding the crack to let the light come in may be harder than we can anticipate. Try Harder.

Sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman term is “incapacitating knowledge” for the technology enabled avalanche of non-stop information that often makes life seem more complicated and disturbing than it already is.

Response: Find Trusted Curators, Brain Train with exposure to art and consider the value of your own contributions to the avalanche.

Response: Sometime wins are hard to recognize until much time has past so lessen the anxiety with a realistic timeline, too.

Albert Einstein said "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Response: For me, everyday is finding the balance.

Albert Einstein said "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Response: Silence, Judge within me.

George Elliot ( of whom I wrote my Senior High English paper to the dismay of the teacher expecting T.S. Elliot) It is never too late to be who you might have been.

Victor Frankl (College Sociology 100) What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

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